Volunteerism, Septuagenarian Style

Ruth Does The Right Thing, Again

Another quick Ruth Story. When she was in her 70s, back in the late 1980s, my mom (Ruth) wanted to volunteer somewhere here in our very small, very rural southern town. She wanted to “do her bit” in a place where she could really make a difference. She said, “I’m not through yet just because I’m old.”

So she started interviewing charities, public concerns, all over town — the public library, the church library, the local domestic violence shelter and more. She decided on meals-on-wheels and became a delivery driver. Most of the people who received the meals were younger than Ruth. I loved this alternate reality.

Then she volunteered with the local literacy program to teach usable math skills to those in the GED program. Ruth said the women in her class ranged in age from 25–late 40s and had no basic grasp of some of the mathematics concepts. Ruth had an engineering degree from 1937 and knew she could help teach math. She was excited about this volunteering prospect.

(btw, spelling septuagenarian ain’t easy)

Ruth told me she taught them that even if you have $400 in your wallet, you don’t have $400 to spend. You can’t spend $100 if you owe over $350 in utilities and rent. This was difficult to teach. I have difficulty with this concept. I want to spend what I see in my bank account. But she persevered and her students became fast friends with her. The class and my mom would often go to lunch together at BoJangles after lessons were completed.

She certainly didn’t volunteer because she viewed others as less, she volunteered because she viewed people as more.

After a few months with the class, we had a horrific murder in town. A young woman walking to work was abducted and killed, her remains found in a plastic trash bag on the edge of town. It rocked the community. The young woman was the daughter of one of Ruth’s students.

Ruth, being Ruth, decided to go to the funeral out of respect for this woman who she considered her friend. She’d developed quite a bond with her students and wanted to show her respect. As she arrived at the small rural Black church on the outskirts of town, she decided to sit at the back and not draw attention to herself. Mom lived a lifetime of things like this — standing up for what was the right thing to do — like attending this funeral.

Soon after sitting down on the back row pew, she noticed the people in church were pointing at her, turning around in their seats, looking at her. She began to feel uncomfortable, noticing she was the only white woman seated in the congregation. Noticing the unwanted attention she got…

She came home from the funeral and told me about it. Laughing she said, “People up front were pointing at me. I felt so self-conscious. What was it? Should I have stayed home? Were they upset because they didn’t know me? I wasn’t afraid, you see, just worried I’d offended someone. Then I figured it out. Everyone was saying ‘see the white woman? Go past her to get to the bathrooms,’ to the small children at the funeral.”

Ahhhh, once again, this Southern story brings about controversy. When I try to write about real experiences, as told by my mother or others, in honest words with no ill intent, I am accused of being insensitive. It amazes and confounds me. It is a funny joke. It’s not a racist story. Ruth laughed about it for years… and the congregation did not view my mother as a interloper, she was thanked for coming and developed a very close relationship with the murdered woman’s mother.

This story was denied by a magazine I “write” for… if you find this story offensive, I hope you’ll rethink its intent. I’m trying to explain how my mother came to be the only white woman at an all black Southern funeral and then some aspect of the funeral itself. Nothing more. In private notes I’m told I stereotype the poor by saying they don’t get the mathematics of money. To this I say, this is the story my mother told me as she taught basic math via a local GED program. This is the story of a woman who volunteered her whole life at organizations ranging from the American Cancer Society to the League of Women’s Voters to various mental health organizations to literacy organizations to churches and libraries, and more. To suggest finding a type of morbid humor in a horrid situation is racist is to remove the humanity from an otherwise unimaginable situation.

Sometimes stories of the South stand on weird ground. We’re not the same as yall.